Pirouette

By Susan Scarlett

"Dancing is not, as with some of the other arts, a matter of short inspiration and quick effects; dancing is a vocation. A girl whom I choose to star as much gives her life to dancing as a novice entering a nunnery gives her life to religion."

So says the demanding Madame Tania as she offers a long-awaited starring role to young J

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781915393296

Susan Scarlett

Susan Scarlett is a pseudonym of the author Noel Streatfeild (1895-1986). She was born in Sussex, England, the second of five surviving children of William Champion Streatfeild, later the Bishop of Lewes, and Janet Venn. As a child she showed an interest in acting, and upon reaching adulthood sought a career in theatre, which she pursued for ten years, in addition to modelling. Her familiarity with the stage was the basis for many of her popular books.Her first children's book was Ballet Shoes (1936), which launched a successful career writing for children. In addition to children's books and memoirs, she also wrote fiction for adults, including romantic novels under the name 'Susan Scarlett'. The twelve Susan Scarlett novels are now republished by Dean Street Press.Noel Streatfeild was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1983.

Book preview

Susan Scarlett

Pirouette

Dancing is not, as with some of the other arts, a matter of short inspiration and quick effects; dancing is a vocation. A girl whom I choose to star as much gives her life to dancing as a novice entering a nunnery gives her life to religion.

So says the demanding Madame Tania as she offers a long-awaited starring role to young Judith Nell, who has strived her whole life for success in the ballet. But her big break arrives just as she’s falling for Paul, who has demands of his own. The resulting conflict, and the pressure from Judith’s mother, who tries to make up for her own stifled ambitions by obsessing over Judith’s career, form the crux of a riveting, poignant tale by an author who knows the ins and outs of ballet better than anyone. Enriching the main story are Judith’s fellow dancers—including a young girl who has sacrificed her youth only to grow too tall for a career—and her brothers. Not to mention the fearsome Madame Tania, who ends by getting told off in no uncertain terms!

Pirouette is the eleventh of twelve charming, page-turning romances published under the pseudonym Susan Scarlett by none other than beloved children’s author and novelist Noel Streatfeild. Out of print for decades, they were rediscovered by Greyladies Books in the early 2010s, and Dean Street Press and Furrowed Middlebrow are delighted now to make all twelve available to a wider audience.

A writer who shows a rich experience in her writing and a charm Nottingham Journal

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Contents

Cover

Title Page/About the Book

Contents

Introduction by Elizabeth Crawford

Pirouette

About the Author

Adult Fiction by Noel Streatfeild

Furrowed Middlebrow

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

When reviewing Clothes-Pegs, Susan Scarlett’s first novel, the Nottingham Journal (4 April 1939) praised the ‘clean, clear atmosphere carefully produced by a writer who shows a rich experience in her writing and a charm which should make this first effort in the realm of the novel the forerunner of other attractive works’. Other reviewers, however, appeared alert to the fact that Clothes-Pegs was not the work of a tyro novelist but one whom The Hastings & St Leonards Observer (4 February 1939) described as ‘already well-known’, while explaining that this ‘bright, clear, generous work’, was ‘her first novel of this type’. It is possible that the reviewer for this paper had some knowledge of the true identity of the author for, under her real name, Noel Streatfeild had, as the daughter of the one-time vicar of St Peter’s Church in St Leonards, featured in its pages on a number of occasions.

By the time she was reincarnated as ‘Susan Scarlett’, Noel Streatfeild (1897-1986) had published six novels for adults and three for children, one of which had recently won the prestigious Carnegie Medal. Under her own name she continued publishing for another 40 years, while Susan Scarlett had a briefer existence, never acknowledged by her only begetter. Having found the story easy to write, Noel Streatfeild had thought little of Ballet Shoes, her acclaimed first novel for children, and, similarly, may have felt Susan Scarlett too facile a writer with whom to be identified. For Susan Scarlett’s stories were, as the Daily Telegraph (24 February 1939) wrote of Clothes-Pegs, ‘definitely unreal, delightfully impossible’. They were fairy tales, with realistic backgrounds, categorised as perfect ‘reading for Black-out nights’ for the ‘lady of the house’ (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 16 October 1939). As Susan Scarlett, Noel Streatfeild was able to offer daydreams to her readers, exploiting her varied experiences and interests to create, as her publisher advertised, ‘light, bright, brilliant present-day romances’.

Noel Streatfeild was the second of the four surviving children of parents who had inherited upper-middle class values and expectations without, on a clergy salary, the financial means of realising them. Rebellious and extrovert, in her childhood and youth she had found many aspects of vicarage life unappealing, resenting both the restrictions thought necessary to ensure that a vicar’s daughter behaved in a manner appropriate to the family’s status, and the genteel impecuniousness and unworldliness that deprived her of, in particular, the finer clothes she craved. Her lack of scholarly application had unfitted her for any suitable occupation, but, after the end of the First World War, during which she spent time as a volunteer nurse and as a munition worker, she did persuade her parents to let her realise her dream of becoming an actress. Her stage career, which lasted ten years, was not totally unsuccessful but, as she was to describe on Desert Island Discs, it was while passing the Great Barrier Reef on her return from an Australian theatrical tour that she decided she had little future as an actress and would, instead, become a writer. A necessary sense of discipline having been instilled in her by life both in the vicarage and on the stage, she set to work and in 1931 produced The Whicharts, a creditable first novel.

By 1937 Noel was turning her thoughts towards Hollywood, with the hope of gaining work as a scriptwriter, and sometime that year, before setting sail for what proved to be a short, unfruitful trip, she entered, as ‘Susan Scarlett’, into a contract with the publishing firm of Hodder and Stoughton. The advance of £50 she received, against a novel entitled Peter and Paul, may even have helped finance her visit. However, the Hodder costing ledger makes clear that this novel was not delivered when expected, so that in January 1939 it was with Clothes-Pegs that Susan Scarlett made her debut. For both this and Peter and Paul (January 1940) Noel drew on her experience of occasional employment as a model in a fashion house, work for which, as she later explained, tall, thin actresses were much in demand in the 1920s.

Both Clothes-Pegs and Peter and Paul have as their settings Mayfair modiste establishments (Hanover Square and Bruton Street respectively), while the second Susan Scarlett novel, Sally-Ann (October 1939) is set in a beauty salon in nearby Dover Street. Noel was clearly familiar with establishments such as this, having, under her stage name ‘Noelle Sonning’, been photographed to advertise in The Sphere (22 November 1924) the skills of M. Emile of Conduit Street who had ‘strongly waved and fluffed her hair to give a bobbed effect’. Sally-Ann and Clothes-Pegs both feature a lovely, young, lower-class ‘Cinderella’, who, despite living with her family in, respectively, Chelsea (the rougher part) and suburban ‘Coulsden’ (by which may, or may not, be meant Coulsdon in the Croydon area, south of London), meets, through her Mayfair employment, an upper-class ‘Prince Charming’. The theme is varied in Peter and Paul for, in this case, twins Pauline and Petronella are, in the words of the reviewer in the Birmingham Gazette (5 February 1940), ‘launched into the world with jobs in a London fashion shop after a childhood hedged, as it were, by the vicarage privet’. As we have seen, the trajectory from staid vicarage to glamorous Mayfair, with, for one twin, a further move onwards to Hollywood, was to have been the subject of Susan Scarlett’s debut, but perhaps it was felt that her initial readership might more readily identify with a heroine who began the journey to a fairy-tale destiny from an address such as ‘110 Mercia Lane, Coulsden’.

As the privations of war began to take effect, Susan Scarlett ensured that her readers were supplied with ample and loving descriptions of the worldly goods that were becoming all but unobtainable. The novels revel in all forms of dress, from underwear, ‘sheer triple ninon step-ins, cut on the cross, so that they fitted like a glove’ (Clothes-Pegs), through daywear, ‘The frock was blue. The colour of harebells. Made of some silk and wool material. It had perfect cut.’ (Peter and Paul), to costumes, such as ‘a brocaded evening coat; it was almost military in cut, with squared shoulders and a little tailored collar, very tailored at the waist, where it went in to flare out to the floor’ (Sally-Ann), suitable to wear while dining at the Berkeley or the Ivy, establishments to which her heroines – and her readers – were introduced. Such details and the satisfying plots, in which innocent loveliness triumphs against the machinations of Society beauties, did indeed prove popular. Initial print runs of 2000 or 2500 soon sold out and reprints and cheaper editions were ordered. For instance, by the time it went out of print at the end of 1943, Clothes-Pegs had sold a total of 13,500 copies, providing welcome royalties for Noel and a definite profit for Hodder.

Susan Scarlett novels appeared in quick succession, particularly in the early years of the war, promoted to readers as a brand; ‘You enjoyed Clothes-Pegs. You will love Susan Scarlett’s Sally-Ann’, ran an advertisement in the Observer (5 November 1939). Both Sally-Ann and a fourth novel, Ten Way Street (1940), published barely five months after Peter and Paul, reached a hitherto untapped audience, each being serialised daily in the Dundee Courier. It is thought that others of the twelve Susan Scarlett novels appeared as serials in women’s magazines, but it has proved possible to identify only one, her eleventh, Pirouette, which appeared, lusciously illustrated, in Woman in January and February 1948, some months before its book publication. In this novel, trailed as ‘An enthralling story – set against the glittering fairyland background of the ballet’, Susan Scarlett benefited from Noel Streatfeild’s knowledge of the world of dance, while giving her post-war readers a young heroine who chose a husband over a promising career. For, common to most of the Susan Scarlett novels is the fact that the central figure is, before falling into the arms of her ‘Prince Charming’, a worker, whether, as we have seen, a Mayfair mannequin or beauty specialist, or a children’s nanny, ‘trained’ in Ten Way Street, or, as in Under the Rainbow (1942), the untrained minder of vicarage orphans; in The Man in the Dark (1941) a paid companion to a blinded motor car racer; in Babbacombe’s (1941) a department store assistant; in Murder While You Work (1944) a munition worker; in Poppies for England (1948) a member of a concert party; or, in Pirouette, a ballet dancer. There are only two exceptions, the first being the heroine of Summer Pudding (1943) who, bombed out of the London office in which she worked, has been forced to retreat to an archetypal southern English village. The other is Love in a Mist (1951), the final Susan Scarlett novel, in which, with the zeitgeist returning women to hearth and home, the central character is a housewife and mother, albeit one, an American, who, prompted by a too-earnest interest in child psychology, popular in the post-war years, attempts to cure what she perceives as her four-year-old son’s neuroses with the rather radical treatment of film stardom.

Between 1938 and 1951, while writing as Susan Scarlett, Noel Streatfeild also published a dozen or so novels under her own name, some for children, some for adults. This was despite having no permanent home after 1941 when her flat was bombed, and while undertaking arduous volunteer work, both as an air raid warden close to home in Mayfair, and as a provider of tea and sympathy in an impoverished area of south-east London. Susan Scarlett certainly helped with Noel’s expenses over this period, garnering, for instance, an advance of £300 for Love in a Mist. Although there were to be no new Susan Scarlett novels, in the 1950s Hodder reissued cheap editions of Babbacombe’s, Pirouette, and Under the Rainbow, the 60,000 copies of the latter only finally exhausted in 1959.

During the ‘Susan Scarlett’ years, some of the darkest of the 20th century, the adjectives applied most commonly to her novels were ‘light’ and ‘bright’. While immersed in a Susan Scarlett novel her readers, whether book buyers or library borrowers, were able momentarily to forget their everyday cares and suspend disbelief, for as the reviewer in the Daily Telegraph (8 February 1941) declared, ‘Miss Scarlett has a way with her; she makes us accept the most unlikely things’.

Elizabeth Crawford

The heavy velvet curtain swung up for the eighth time. The three ballerinas curtsied to the ground. The coryphées, holding hands, ran on in two lines and curtsied behind them. Judith was the first of the line of coryphées on the left. As she stooped, her sleek black head bent, she seemed a fragment of the white picture on the stage; but only her body was a part, her mind was detached from what was happening.

All the evening her mind had been on her work. That unconscious memorizing ahead that belongs to the interpretive artist. Through three different ballets she had thought, My arms raised to that position, My head forward that way, My feet . . . and then her mind memorized a chain of dancing words, arabesques, attitudes, chassés, bourrées-changées ruements, pirouettes, and the other intricate terms that had been drilled into her brain since her eighth birthday. She was tired. An act of Coppelia, Aurora’s Wedding and Sylphides was a strain. Even as she curtsied she was mentally taking off her ballet dress, tights and shoes and was slipping into her street things and stepping out of the stage door where, by now, Paul Conquest would be waiting. Thinking of Paul gave Judith a queer, fluttering feeling round her heart. Half fright, half happiness. Paul, with his square chin and honest blue eyes, was so masterful. Somehow he seemed to have become part of her life, and part of her life that Mummy knew nothing about. If Mummy knew how often she saw Paul would Mummy mind?

The curtain dropped, the stage staff pulled back part of one side of it to allow the stars to take their final curtains and bows.

My word, I’m tired. It was hot dancing to-night. Judith smiled. She liked to feel Nadia’s arm through hers. Quite apart from the fact that she was Paul Conquest’s sister she admired her enormously. Nadia had Paul’s blue eyes but where Paul’s hair was sandy Nadia’s was red-gold. Judith had never been to Paul and Nadia’s home, but she knew it would be quite different in every way from her own home. The Conquests had a flat in Park Lane. Judith had never seen a flat in Park Lane but from just the way Nadia spoke about her home she could see it was very different from The Nook, 10, Bellevue Road, N.10. Nadia was older than Judith; she was nearly nineteen while Judith had only just had her eighteenth birthday. All through their training Nadia had been nice to her in spite of the age difference. She had been ten when she first joined the school and so had started in the same class as Judith. Judith, small, shy and feeling insignificant had been so glad of the unshy and very far from insignificant Nadia’s backing. Nadia was everything that Judith was not except in just one thing, which Judith knew instinctively. Nadia was not so good a dancer as she was. It was hard to say what Nadia lacked; her technique was good and her musicality was good, but somehow you knew when she danced how well trained she had been, and when you remember training as you watch a dancer that dancer cannot be good. The last two or three months Judith, for the first time in the nine years of their friendship, had begun to feel pity for Nadia. That bogy of the dancer’s existence had reared its repulsive head. She had grown too tall. She was lovely and her figure was perfect, but when she was on her points she looked a young giantess. She was not, of course, it was illusion, the average dancer being so short, but sooner or later she might have to face the fact that dancing as a career was not for her. Judith could not imagine how Nadia would take that. Life had been so easy and so kind to her, how would she accept that deadly blow when she faced up to it? She who was so ambitious.

As they climbed the stairs to their dressing-room Nadia lowered her voice.

Going out with Paul, aren’t you?

Judith was surprised. The Conquests were a detached family, or at least detached according to the Nell family standard. Interference in each other’s lives was considered bad manners amongst the Conquests. In the Nell family interference wasn’t considered interference, it was just ordinary home life. It was queer that Paul should have told Nadia where he was going.

He only rang up just after I got to the theatre. I can’t stay long, Mummy hates if it I’m late without telling her.

Nadia tried not to let her face show what she thought of Mrs. Nell. Her own mother was called by her Christian name and she had never allowed her, practically since she could speak, to interfere with her in any way.

You’re getting quite a big girl now, you won’t be able to spend the rest of your life saying ‘Mummy hates . . .’ Some day you’ll have to grow up and say ‘Judith doesn’t care a damn what Mummy hates, this is what she’s going to do’.

Judith felt the odd, frightened feeling round her heart that she had when she thought of Paul. They were frightening somehow, these Conquests. Sweeping people aside as though they didn’t exist, as if there could ever be a day when she felt that she didn’t care a damn about what Mummy thought. Mummy, who had sacrificed everything to give her a chance and make her a dancer. Mummy, who never for one minute wavered in her faith that her daughter was a genius. If it hadn’t been for Mummy often and often she would have lost heart. It was difficult to go on believing in yourself when the other girls in your class were picked out; even Nadia had danced the mazurka in Swan Lake, and she had never yet danced except with the corps de ballet. Mummy said it didn’t matter, that one day everybody would come to their senses and see that they had a jewel unnoticed in their midst. Those were Mummy’s very words. Because Mummy was so ambitious and so trusting and believing Judith felt mean that she had let the friendship between herself and Paul grow without telling her. Whatever would Mummy do if she knew that sometimes, just sometimes when she was depressed and discouraged, she wondered if Paul was right and the ballet didn’t matter after all. That there were other things besides dance you could do with your life. In her more confident moments she knew it was not true, at any rate not for years. Why, if Mummy even suspected such a thing she would be so upset that she might be very ill. She answered Nadia lightly. It was no good explaining to Nadia about Mummy, she would never understand.

She waits up for me every night to watch me eat my supper. She says she isn’t tired, but I can see that she is. She’s awfully good and never complains, but she has a long day; it starts getting breakfast for the others, and sometimes when I come in late because I’ve been with Paul or with you, though she’s very brave I can see her holding her back while I’m eating because it’s aching from all the work she has to do.

They had reached the dressing-room door. Nadia felt, not for the first time, that she could shake Judith, not in anger but to free her from her cluttering family hanging on to her. Instead she gave her an affectionate pat.

Take off your make-up quickly, then, for I know Paul wants to talk to you specially.

Judith slipped out of her ballet frock. She said nothing but she gave Nadia a quick, scared glance and caught her breath to stop the fluttering feeling round her heart. Paul wanted to talk especially. Oh dear! He couldn’t want her to make up her mind about anything now, could he? Not for years yet. She sat down and, with hands that trembled a little, she rubbed grease into her face to take off her make-up.

Paul was leaning against the doorkeeper’s box at the stage door. His foot was against the swing doors which led through to the theatre. He had been holding them ajar so that he could hear the distant music of Sylphides. In his mind he could see Judith, tiny, slim, her black hair parted in the middle and fastened in a net at the nape of her neck. Of all the ballets in which he had seen Judith he thought Sylphides was the one which was really her. Those delicate, drooping, disembodied figures in their long white dresses, were Judith somehow. She was disembodied, not quite real, not a flesh-and-blood girl that you could take hold of by the shoulders and shake and say, Come on, my child, this is life we’re living in, not a fairy tale.

The doorkeeper knew Paul and for whom he was waiting. He knew all the stage door habitués. He leant forward across the wooden ledge which separated his office from the world of the theatre. He spoke in a gusty, wheezy voice.

I never could ’ave put a daughter of mine to it. Not me. When mine were growing up there was a bit of nonsense talked about the theatre, and the youngest, she did two seasons in panto with Mrs. Bick, she was one of Bick’s Babies, but when she was fourteen turned I said, ‘Enough’s enough’ and I put that one to typing and the other I apprenticed to a hairdresser. Never regretted it, both married now.

Paul offered a cigarette.

Sometimes, you know, it’s the parents who are keen on a theatrical career. It’s they who keep the daughters at it.

The doorkeeper nodded and winked.

You’ve said it. Most of our young ladies’ mothers is ’oly terrors, but if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a ’undred times, there’s none to touch that Mrs. Nell. Terrible it was when Judith was a child and the students gave a show; you must ’ave been to them to see yer sister. Paul nodded. "Well, that Mrs. Nell used to create somethin’ shockin’. First it was why hadn’t Judith got a better rôle to dance, always thought she ought to be the lead, you know. Then it was the clothes. The students provided